LAS VEGAS — Chevrolet unveiled its new Sprint Cup car — the Chevrolet SS — with a lot of fanfare Thursday after more than a year developing a new rear-wheel drive car and creating a Cup car to match its stylish look.

The SS (super sport) passenger car, built in Australia and sold in the United States, won’t be unveiled until February around the time of the 2013 Daytona 500 — and won’t be available in showrooms until August.

Chevrolet is banking on consumers getting excited over a new car while its NASCAR drivers hope it races as well as it looks.

“The showroom relevance is what all the manufactures have been looking for,” said Richard Childress Racing driver Kevin Harvick. “Hopefully you can bring back a little of that ‘win on Sunday, sell on Monday’ (campaign) with our Chevrolet SS having NASCAR as its marketing platform.”

But how will it race and how will it sell? In some ways, both the racing and production sides are venturing into an unknown with new cars and a new brand.

“There’s definitely going to be some things to work through, but if the racing is not as good as it (used to be) where we were, hopefully we can make it better than that right off the bat,” Harvick said.

All new racecars are a work in progress, but NASCAR hopes the 2013 Sprint Cup car will race better with 160 pounds less weight and new rules, especially restrictions covering the rear suspensions.

“I haven’t driven it but one time … but I know there’s going to be a lot of differences,” said 2011 Cup champion Tony Stewart.

Stewart won’t be at the Dec. 11-12 open test at Charlotte Motor Speedway, but Stewart-Haas Racing teammate Ryan Newman will test the car amid a heavy Chevy presence. All three RCR cars will be there, as will three Hendrick Motorsports cars and one from Earnhardt Ganassi Racing.

Most of the work will focus on weight distribution and how to set up the rear suspension to get the car to turn.

“How guys are moving the rear ends around — a lot of that is going to be eliminated,” Stewart said. “It helps simplify to where it’s not so much a science project. It’s got a lot more potential to make the field that much tighter because you’re not going to have all this trick stuff.”

While the competitors will try to get a handle on the car on the track, off the track, Chevrolet is banking on using the engineering, technology and infrastructure used to build its Holden Commodore in Australia to create a rear-wheel drive V-8 production car for sale in the United States. It will be the first time in 17 years that Chevrolet will offer a rear-wheel-drive sedan in the U.S.

The costs were too prohibitive to build the car in the United States, so it will be built in Australia and shipped to the U.S.

“What we like about it is it’s an authentic real-wheel drive V-8 — we’ll be selling that in the showroom and racing that on the track,” said Chevrolet U.S. Vice President of Performance Vehicles and Motorsports Jim Campbell. “That was really the key decision; we wanted an architecture that made a very legitimate connection to what we are racing on the track.”

Chevrolet was the last manufacturer among the three Cup manufacturers (Toyota, Ford and Chevrolet) to unveil its 2013 car.